Re: PCI passthrough

[Christoph Egger <Christoph_Egger%gmx.de@localhost>]

Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 06:54:14PM -0500, Sam Fourman Jr. wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am a little Confused about what PCI pass through actually means.
>>
>> Does this mean that I could have a NetBSD 5 Dom0 Machine
>> that has Say a Nvidia 8800 PCIe Video card, and pass that video device
>> through to a
>> WindowsXP HVM? and then load up the Nvidia Device drivers in Windows?
> 
> that's it. Exept I'm not sure it would work properly with a VGA PCI device:
> these are not "pure" PCI devices, but also respond to legacy ISA VGA
> registers. 
> 
> Also, with Xen 3.1 you can't pass a PCI device to a HVM guest. I don't
> know if it would work with Xen 3.3
> 

With Xen 3.3 it is possible. An IOMMU is required though.

Christoph